Top 10 Social Media Apps for Marketing Your Business

All businesses must use social media to capitalize on the current marketing opportunities that are out there, but its management can be very overwhelming. Below we not only discuss the best apps for saving time on social media marketing, but also include the best social media tools to help engage with customers.

Spreaker

This mobile and web app allows musicians and anyone else to broadcast whatever they want to play or say over the web to anyone around the world. As a business owner, why should you care?

Well, Spreaker allows you to speak directly to your customers, potential customers and fans with your own voice. Just record your call to action or the latest news from your company and when you post it to Facebook, your fans or customers can click play and hear your voice as if you’re right there in the room with them. No other communication tool has this level of direct interactivity.

LocalVox

With so many social media destinations available to promote your business, it can be overwhelming and cost you many hours that you can’t afford to waste. This is the beauty of LocalVox. The app allows you to manage your entire social media presence in one place. You can update your website and all your social media profiles with the push of a button. You can send your updates through your e-mail newsletter and to select local mobile phones. You can also monitor your rating on review sites like Yelp at the exact same time. LocalVox is the Ginsu Knife of social media managers: it does it all.

Asana

This is a project communication manager designed to reduce a team’s use of e-mail, which helps save time and minimize distraction. Each team gets a workspace. Each workspace contains projects, and those projects contain tasks to which any member of the team can add comments, tags or attachments. Asana allows an entire team and even an entire small company to see what their employees are doing. Employees, in turn, can receive real-time feedback instantly on their work, while their employer can see exactly how a project is progressing.

MailChimp

Used by celebrities like Marc Maron to promote his podcast to listeners and Fortune 500 companies for their e-mail newsletters, the often-imitated, but never-duplicated MailChimp makes it easy to design an e-mail newsletter and track your subscribers. Whether you’re sending your newsletter out to a few pre-selected demographics or your entire customer pages, this e-mail communications management tool is about as turnkey as it gets when it comes to keeping your contacts informed about your company’s latest goings on.

TweetBot

This is a great way for businesses that get thousands of retweets or “@ replies” on their posts to manage Twitter and filter their timelines so they don’t see these things — as certain aspects of your timeline can be muted temporarily. You can also manage multiple timelines at once, saving time with Twitter-convertible gestures rather than typing things out manually. You can also attach images, videos, notes and more with one button. The one drawback, though, is that TweetBot is only available for Apple devices such as iPhones, iPads, MacBooks and the iPod Touch, so Android and Windows users will probably need something similar for those platforms.

Glyder

This app puts a variety of marketing tactics for businesses at your fingertips and on your phone. Choose easy-to-use templates such as “Offer a Daily Deal,” “Offer a Coupon,” “Show Appreciation” or “Ask for Engagement” to get your customers excited on social media. Add a few details like your business name and URL and then choose your share options, such as e-mail, Facebook, Mailchimp, SMS, and/or Twitter and you’re done just that quickly.

Downcast

One of the best podcast apps available for $1.99, Downcast will allow you to conveniently listen to the best social media marketing podcasts available on the net. The layout is clean, simple and straightforward, so it’s very easy to find every podcast you wish to subscribe to and play it directly. A lot of apps for podcasts offer something similar, but Downcast allows you to micro-manage everything to do with your podcast collection from how the podcasts are organized to how you scroll through them.

Freedly

In the same way you can manage your podcasts with Downcast, you can manage all the blogs you read with Freedly. If you subscribe to many blogs, Freedly allows you to access and read them all at once. Its interface makes reading comfortable – and more importantly, if you want to share any blog or article you read, that’s easy too and it works with all the popular social networks with a newsfeed.

Mention

Mention allows any business owner to keep track of mentions of either keywords of their choosing or their brand name on any social network. This makes it easy to monitor where your brand is getting traction and respond to “@ replies” either directly through the mobile app or through e-mail. This is perfect for that business owner who wants to monitor and keep track of their social media presence, but is always on the go and can’t be in front of a computer all day.

SocialOomph

Though this app has a paid option, you get so many features with its free version that you don’t really need to give over your cash. Here you can schedule tweets throughout the day, so can use your time for more important things. One dashboard helps you monitor all of your social media accounts at once and you can even go nuclear and “purge” or erase all your tweets.

Editor’s Note:

If you’re looking for an in-depth, comprehensive real-time social media monitoring and engagement solution, consider Heartbeat, powered by Sysomos. Heartbeat collects all relevant online conversations so companies can track and measure campaigns, brands and products, and easily identify and build relationships with key influencers.